The information and privacy commissioner’s office will decide whether the City of Richmond should have released more information to the Richmond News about construction delays when building the Minoru Centre for Active Living (MCAL).
The $84 million facility, which partially opened almost two years late, is the subject of several lawsuits between the city and the contractor, Stuart Olson.
When the Richmond News filed a freedom-of-information request in February 2019 for documents asking about the delays, the city sent two memos that had been sent to council, an already published press release and briefing notes for the public and media — out of a total of 3,865 pages of records.
When a challenge to the city didn’t produce any new results, the News proceeded to move forward with an inquiry, which will be done by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner.
The city cited five sections of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act when refusing to disclose documents to the News.
These were policy advice and recommendations, legal advice, disclosure harmful to the financial or economic interests of a public body, for example, trade secrets or negotiations, disclosure harmful to business interests of a third party and disclosure harmful to personal privacy.
The adjudicator in the inquiry will decide whether more documents should have been released.
The city has been given a deadline of June 16 for its submissions, and the News has to respond by July 8.
The city has retained the law firm Young Anderson to deal with the inquiry.
The seniors centre and events centre at the MCAL opened in March 2019, but the discovery of a cracked lap pool the month prior was cited as causing a further delay in opening the aquatic centre.
In fact, lawsuit documents showed that a second lap pool had problems with the waterproofing membrane, which caused leaking in the crawl space below.
